


Waking Up To You (Apparently)

by awkwardCerberus



Series: Slow Down For A Moment (If Only Just For Me) [1]
Category: Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie) Spoilers, M/M, MY PRECIOUS BABIES, apparently, god i love this ship, hawksilver - Freeform, i want them to be happy, is that so hard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-17
Updated: 2015-05-17
Packaged: 2018-03-30 22:51:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3954877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/awkwardCerberus/pseuds/awkwardCerberus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When he woke up, he didn't expect to fall in love with the man he took eight bullets for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Waking Up To You (Apparently)

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to tumblr, i shipped these two before i had even seen AoU. And then I actually watched it and i wanted to carve my heart out with a spork. Anyways, this fic was inspired by a some lovely fanart (which i have added links to), and the rest of this series is my shipping trash brain taking a joyride.

That fanart can be found [here](http://nanemia.tumblr.com/post/117545920661/i-didnt-see-that-coming).

* * *

“…etro?”

It was distant, and pleading, and there was a squeezing on his hand that matched the desperateness of the voice. Everything was fuzzy—his mind was stuffed with cotton; he felt like he was floating in a cold sea—and there was a sharp little pricking in his arm. Is this what coming back from the brink of death felt like? He could feel the thick gauze wrapping around him, and there was an absurd amount of it at that. He couldn’t tell how far it went, or how much there was. Part of him wanted to open his eyes, though all he could do for the moment was flutter his eyes lids aimlessly in the attempt.

“Pietro..?”

It all rushed back at him. All of it. And he could hear the machine gun shoot each individual bullet again—he felt each of those bullets tearing through his skin again. He felt the air rush up his face as he hit the rubble and pavement. He felt his body get colder. He remembered the last thing he felt was Wanda’s own pain, and he could feel her breaking, even from so far away. He could feel her scream.

“Pietro!”

He bolted so far up in the bed that he was almost doubling over, and the heart monitor jumped with him. For a moment, he didn't feel anything. But then the white hot pain that he had been ignoring shot through him all at once, and his breathing hitched in his throat as Wanda gently pulled him back down on the bed. Pietro stared blankly at her for a moment, before she buried her face in his shoulder and sobbed loudly into his skin—she was mumbling in Sokovian, but it was too distorted by her cries that he only picked up every few words. “Idiot” and “stupid” came up most often.

"Wanda, I….” Pietro’s voice was rough from disuse, and even those tiny word felt like sandpaper against his throat, but simply hearing him speak made his sister cry harder. “So sorry. Please….I’m so sorry.”

 _"What were you thinking?!”_ she half shrieked in that angry Sokovian they both had the habit of slipping into. She didn’t bother wiping the running mascara off her face; if anything, she used the black streaks as evidence against her brother. “ _We promised each other! **You** promised **me!** That we’d only sacrifice ourselves for one another! You weren’t thinking, you never think!” _She bowed her head against his bare shoulder again, and switched back to her sob-choked English, “I almost lost you.”

Pietro let out a quiet sigh and leaned back on the pillows. There was nothing he could say to even remotely help Wanda, but when he leaned down to kiss her hair, she stopped crying—even if it was for only a split second. When he laid back, his torso screamed in protest. Damn metabolism, the meds were being burned off before they could even work. But instead of telling someone, Pietro was his usual stubborn self and kept quiet about it. All his pain aside, the amount of bandages they had wrapped him in was absurd.

The gauze began up at his neck, and wrapped down to where it branched off and wrapped around his shoulders—the gauze on his right extended further down his arm than it did on the left. Though, on his left arm, another stretch of gauze started just below his elbow and went all the way down to his knuckles, except for a small bit that wrapped around a few of his fingers before it finally stopped. Under the thin gauze, were thicker bandages, though there was only one small one below his wrist, and a couple thin ones on his hand and fingers. However, the gauze on his shoulders and torso were much thicker—extending all the way down to his hips—and there where heavier-duty squares of cotton where the bullets had once been. When he tried to get more comfortable, he found another bandage tightly wrapped just above his left knee. The speedster made a small “tch” sound and dropped his head back against the pillow. He had just began to rub his thumb along Wanda’s knuckles when something bumped against his other hand. A small plastic cup floated on a little cloud of red wisps.

“You should drink something.” Wanda had picked her head up and was wiping away her ruined mascara with the back of her hand. “Just a little water, brother.”

He took the cup gingerly in his bandaged hand, although his sister kept the small kinetic cloud underneath it for a moment just in case it slipped. The water was lukewarm, but it felt so good going down. He thought he was fine, until he set the cup down on the nearby tray and his stomach betrayed him with a loud growl. Suddenly he felt starved, and Wanda almost smiled when she saw her brother blush. Pietro was about to make a joke, when the door opened.

“So, there’s a briefing in, like, five minutes, and Steve—,” Clint froze in the middle of the doorway and stared for a second at the two of them before continuing. “Huh, well, I’m glad you’re awake. All of us were getting kinda worried that you wouldn’t…” Wanda glared at him, her irises glowing with a faint red that told him he’d crossed a line. “Right, sorry. Aannyyways, since Steve doesn’t mind if you’re late, I was thinking that if I went with you he’d wouldn’t care..?”

The girl gave a hard sigh and stood up from her chair, “I’ll go, but you stay with Pietro.”

Both men stared at her confused, but it was her brother who protested first. “Wanda, wha—“

“I need someone to watch you and make sure you don’t go sneaking out of bed. You’ll try and go running.” When he tried opening his mouth to protest again, she flicked a tiny beam of red energy at his face, and added quietly in Sokovian: “ _And I want someone to watch you until I get back. I want to know you’ll be okay.”_

“ _Come on, I—“_

_“I did not watch the doctors operate for five hours to argue with you over something so stupid. Humor me, Pietro. Please.”_

The speedster crossed his arms irritably—even if it did hurt—and rolled his eyes. “Fine.” His English was just as snarky as his Sokovian.

Wanda’s eyes softened, “I’ll ask the nurse to bring you something to eat,” she added gently before stepping out and shutting the door.

Clint flopped into the chair Wanda was previously in and pulled out his phone—muttering how Steve better not get pissed for him being late just because he was babysitting. He purposely dropped the manila folder he had had under his arm on the floor while he texted. Pietro side-glanced one of the papers that had slid out of the folder a little. He could just barely make out “State Divorce Filing” from the margin. The archer saw this out of the corner of his eye, and he ignored the urge to snap at the kid. He moved a foot casually in front of the paper, and when he saw Pietro move his gaze, he started typing.

**> > Not gonna be at briefing. SW made my babysit QS while she went.**

**If he wakes up, give him the envelope I left on the counter. <<**

**> > k. but take notes for me? I’d hate to miss your flooring lecture**

**… <<**

**I’ll have Nat bring you a copy. <<**

Clint left his phone in the chair as he went across the room to pick up a large, and also slightly heavy, envelope. He dropped on the speedster’s lap with a quiet “from Steve,” and ignored the younger man’s obvious wince when the weight hit him—the package had hit him right where his stiches were. But regardless, Pietro pulled out a black tablet and tapped it on, before scrolling and tapping at the screen. Clint began to ignore the kid, busying himself with pulling a pen from behind his ear and filling out the paper work. And that’s that.

Until about five minutes later, when one of the nurses shyly stepped in and set a tray of food down on the table. Pietro gave her a small smile and a quiet “thank you” before picking the small chocolate pudding off the tray and holding it out to Clint.

“Want this?”

The archer swapped his gaze between the pudding and Pietro for a few seconds before giving the kid a solid, confused look—punctuating the awkward silence with a simple, “what?”

Pietro’s eye roll is practically audible. “Do. You. Want. It? I’m not going to eat it. And it’s pointless to waste it.”

Clint slowly takes the offering, and pauses for a moment before setting the paper and pen aside and eating the pudding. For a moment he thinks the kid used his super speed to slip something into the pudding to poison him, or at least that he did something to it. But once he finishes eating, and throws the container and the spoon in the trash can with perfect accuracy. And then he looked at Pietro. His eyes paused along all the heavy bandages under the gauze—and for only a moment he tried to wrap his head around the fact that a few days ago, he was staring at Pietro lying in the rubble with blood soaking his shirt and his eyes staring blankly at nothing. He snapped himself out of that train of thought and went back to filling out his papers.

Clint didn’t look up from where he had resumed writing, though he began to chew the end of his pen, only pausing to make quick marks on his paper. “Ya know, hospital pudding is one of the most coveted foods in America. Like, its right up there with Twinkies.”

Pietro looked over at him from the turkey sandwich he was devouring. He took another bite and shook his head a little, “too sweet for me. All your American foods, they’re all so…so…artificial.”

“Yeah well, gotta enjoy life, right?” He knew the joke would flop the second it left his mouth, so he didn’t bother straining a laugh out.

The speedster stabbed a hole in the top of a juice box with his fingernail and sucked the contents out in one swallow. He looked down at the tray as he placed it on the side table and smiled a tiny smile. If Wanda was here, she would smack his shoulder and scold him for eating too fast…just like their mother used to. And then his smile was gone, and he remembered seeing Clint's divorce papers. He felt the slightest pity for the archer, even if it was short lived. A half of him wanted to ask, but another half told him to be quiet. The former won.

“Your wife, Lyra—no….Laura, yes—you two are…?” He didn't want to outright say it, so he made a vague motion with his hands to finish for him.

Clint sighed and kicked his feet up onto the bed near Pietro—careful to watch where they landed. “Yeah. I hate it as much as she does, but…” he set the papers down and rubbed his temples, “she said it's for the kids. That she can't live with worrying about whether or not I'm gonna come home after stepping out the door.”

“But what about your children? They'll still see you?” The amount of concern in his question took both of them by surprise.

“I get them in the summer. When they're off school.” Clint set his feet back on the floor, and ran his hands through his hair. “I get my kids for three months, and she gets them for nine. And then, and then the thing with the baby is that I can get him every summer with the other kids, but only once he’s two or three…I don’t know the details, I just…sign the papers.”

“I’m sorry, that must be hard.”

“It’s no parade, I’ll tell you that.” He clicked the pen and flopped it and the file on the floor again.

They were silent again for another few minutes, neither of them knowing what to say. Clint’s phone bleeped, but he only looked at the screen and ignored it. Pietro picked up the tablet and began reading it again. The prospect of joining the Avengers with his sister was not his idea of an ideal job, but he would do anything for Wanda. And from what he was reading in her file, she was doing very well—her training scores were all phenomenal, and for once, they could fit in someplace as people instead of science experiments.

“Hey, kid, look. I gotta say something. I never got to thank you. For…,” the archer moved a hand in a circular motion across his chest, “ya know, saving my life. That was really brave of you—stupid as all fuck—but brave. You’ll make a good Avenger. So will your sister. You two are like nothing I’ve ever seen, and…I’m proud that I’ll be fighting with you two instead of against you.” He sat back in his chair, absentmindedly scratching the back of his neck. “I promise that was all impromptu, I didn’t memorize it ahead of time.”

Pietro was only silent. He watched Clint get up and pour himself some water, drink it, and go back to his chair with a look of too many emotions to name. But one of them, he knew, was close enough to admiration that that might as well have been it. Something about Clint made him feel funny. Not _bad_ funny…just funny. But he didn’t know how to describe it. And it was beginning to bother him.

“She never left the room while you were out. Hell, she never even left this chair.”

Pietro looked up from his tablet. He knew exactly who he was talking about, his sister’s stubbornness was given away easily enough.

“For fifteen days she refused to move. When we had someone try and make you move she mind-controlled them into leaving.” There was a fondness to the way he talked about Wanda, like she was family to him.

“That’s Wanda,” the smile he didn’t remember having had almost immediately faded, “fifteen days?”

“Mhmm. I never paid much attention, but after the first week, they said you had a ‘night terror-induced seizer’, only it was, like, a super-speed seizer, or something. Anyways, you completely ripped open all your stiches and then some. They wheeled you back into O.R. for another few hours.” Clint didn’t mean to sound so morbid, but at the same time he didn’t want to sugarcoat it for the kid—he deserved to know more than anybody. “Wanda was really broken up. But, I think she’ll be doing a lot better now that you’re—you know—conscious. But she really likes—”

“If I asked you to have dinner with me, would you go?”

The question froze Clint midsentence, and for a split second his brain forgot how to work. For the second time that day, he found himself asking: “what?”

Also for the second time that night, Pietro gave another dramatic eye roll, “you really are an old man. And deaf too. I asked if you wanted to have diner sometime.”

Did Pietro just ask him out on a date? “Did you just ask me out on a date?”

The younger man ignored the dull pain in his shoulders when he shrugged, “I don’t know. It depends. But, you’re not getting any younger. Do you want to go have dinner? It’s yes or no.”

Clint tried his hardest not to make his answer sound like forced, but he said it anyways, “Yes…”

Pietro smiled a cocky smile, (he would have like to laugh, but that would hurt too much), “then yes, old man. I asked you on a date.”

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> as always, this was un-beta'd, so any mistakes are mine


End file.
